Lonely King
by Dawnstorm101
Summary: When Thor is killed during the final battle against Thanos, Loki finally gets the throne he never really wanted. But between his grief and the various pressures of settling on Earth, it quickly takes its toll. Until Valkyrie finally steps in.


A/N: So this concept has been in my head since like December, and King and Queen day of Valki week finally prompted me to cobble something together real quick. I hope y'all enjoy!

Note: This mixes together IW canon and chapter 13 of New Beginnings.

* * *

With his usual tenacity and fashionably late timing, Loki managed to drag himself out of death's clutches in time to aid in Thanos's defeat. Thor's relief at the reunion was quite literally explosive, the resulting combination of lightning and magic quite the sight to behold.

But still, when the Titan lay dead and the dust had resettled into the forms of the fallen, only one brother drew breath.

Val wove through the crowd of reuniting people – Gamora and Peter sharing a passionate kiss, Tony frantically patting down his own Peter as if terrified he would disappear again, Okoye embracing T'Challa before scolding him for dying on her – to reach her king and her prince. Only to stop short in the sunlight, the joy of the reunions behind her fading to a taunting buzz.

In a pool of sunlight, Thor lay on his back, blood pooling slowly around him. Loki knelt over him, his hands trembling as he searched futilely for a way to stop the bleeding. "You'll be fine, you'll be fine, I just have to-"

"Loki," Thor interrupted. His voice was hardly more than a rasping breath, but it still stopped Loki in his tracks. "It's ok."

"No, don't say that, you have to fight this," Loki protested. The sun shone on his tears, slicing through the dirt and blood on his cheeks.

Thor smiled, lifting his hand cup Loki's neck. "You'll get through this, Loki. I believe in you."

"Thor, no," Loki whispered, taking his hand. "I can't…"

"You can," Thor insisted. "I promise you can."

A gentle breeze wove over the battlefield, brushing through Val's hair with the same warmth she had come to associate with Odin's son. She bowed her head, closing her eyes to hold back her tears, knowing what this last, seemingly random use of power meant.

"Thor?" Loki said, his voice wavering. "Thor? Thor, no, don't leave me, please don't leave me- _Thor_!"

Taking a steadying breath, Val closed the remaining distance and knelt beside the brothers. She wrapped her arm around Loki's back, pressing a tender kiss to his hair. He hardly seemed to notice as, slowly, he gave up on trying to shake Thor awake. He just clutched his brother close, bowing forward to press their foreheads together as he cried.

The ritual prayer, instinctive even after a millennium, rose to her lips, but how could she say it? _Nor shall we mourn, but rejoice for those who have died a glorious death._ How could she say _that_ while Loki cried over the body of his last family, mumbles of "Please don't leave me" still escaping him between desperate sobs?

 _Not his last family,_ she thought as she tried feebly to comfort him, rubbing his back and playing with his hair. They had exchanged wedding vows before he turned himself over to Thanos, after all. Human ones – at some point they would need a proper Asgardian wedding – but... the intent was there.

Although, as she looked up at all the faces she hardly recognized, all the faces Loki had once attacked, she didn't know how much comfort that would truly bring.

-MCU-

The next month crawled by. T'Challa agreed to let them settle in easily enough, albeit with certain conditions, but then it was off to find the place where Val had left the civilians. Then they brought them back to Wakanda, finding places to put them and struggling to gain a foothold on which to rebuild even as the Wakandans struggled – the dissolved might be back, but the Outrider invasion had cost their army greatly.

And then there was the separate matter of convincing the world governments that Loki could be trusted to stay at all. T'Challa did what he could, but even as they welcomed the aid Wakanda had opened up, other leaders had only grown more suspicious of what the country was hiding and what they could do. The others stepped in too – Tony and Steve, Bruce and Sam, Rhodey and Pepper, everyone with any sort of weight – but frankly, despite saving the world, their own sway had dimmed drastically too.

Leaving the burden of proof of reliability almost squarely on Loki's shoulders. No sooner had his tears stopped than he had lifted his chin, pulling into place a mask that wasn't quite steely, nor was it fully polite. To be too polite would arouse suspicion that he was planning something, yet nor could he openly be his mischievous self, lest they misinterpret a joke as a threat. His silver tongue and adaptable personality came in handy, but as he walked the tightrope day after day, night after night, Val could see him wearing down.

It was subtle, at first. A flex of his fingers, a twitch of his mouth, a slip of his tone on one word. Questioned again and again, about his motives, his past, even his biology. Val tended to step in on that one, doing her own best to rein in the rage that even on a world that hadn't met them in his lifetime, Loki's Jotun heritage would be held against him.

But as the days went on and the questions and crises kept hitting, the strain grew. The flexes turned to tremors, the moments he took to compose himself stretched into noticeable pauses, the shadows in his mind turned to shadows under his eyes. And all Val could do was watch.

She tried. She tried to share the work, to do some of the talking, hell, just to _be_ there. But he insisted it was his burden, that he owed the Asgardians for everything he'd done, that he could handle it. That he owed it to Thor. So he brushed her off.

With a clenched jaw and aching heart, she let him. Maybe this was how he coped – who was she to judge? At least he didn't seem set on living at the bottom of a bottle for the next 1,500 years, hiding from everyone and everything. This method would wear him out, so she decided to wait it out.

At least, she tried to wait it out.

Until the day they were dealing with a particularly unpleasant man named Ross. She wasn't entirely sure _why_ they were dealing with him, which seemed like a failure on her part as queen, but any craps she gave flew out the window when he said _that_.

"General," Loki said with a smile so tight it was almost hostile, "I understand your position-"

"Do you?" Ross countered, leaning on the silver conference table. Outside the two glass walls, storm clouds roiled, dark and menacing. Clint, who had been plucked from the tiny crowd of "Asgardian experts" to bridge the two cultures (a completely bull assignment if you asked Val – it was just an excuse to have someone with experience fighting Loki in the same room to guard the human politicians), pushed off the white wall he leaned against, seeming to sense where Ross was about to go. He gestured frantically, making chopping motions across his throat as he moved to stand next to the middle of the table.

Ross didn't get the hint.

"Or are you as ignorant as your dead brother?"

Loki went white as a sheet, and Val swore his eyes flashed red. He pressed his hands flat to the table, frost spreading slowly from his splayed fingers, accented by ripples of green that blackened their path along the frost, reaching closer to Ross. Loki's chest started to heave, and his eyes were _definitely_ turning red.

"Ok, we're leaving," Clint said, taking Loki's arm. He hissed in pain, and in taking Loki's other arm, Val realized why.

He was freezing.

Ross huffed, straightening up. "You really haven't changed, _Laufeyson_."

"Pal," Clint growled, "I ain't doing this to protect you, so with no due respect whatsoever, shut your damn face."

And with that, Clint hauled Loki to his feet and marched him out, leaving a scandalized Ross behind.

For the first time in a month, Loki didn't protest the care. The red had vanished from his eyes and the spreading frost had turned into shaking, but he was still painfully cold. When a tear slipped free of his eye, it froze on his cheek before he could swipe it away.

"Here," Clint said, pushing open a door. It was a small room, as far as the compound's rooms went, featuring a sitting area on one side and a gaming area on the other. "It's not exactly cozy, but I'll have Friday keep people out."

"Thank you," Val said, leading Loki to the nearest couch. Clint shut the door, leaving them alone, and Loki practically collapsed onto the cushion. He was shaking like a leaf, his tears silent and frozen, and she pulled him into her arms.

But as she started shivering, he seemed to remember where he was. He tried to pull away.

"No," she insisted, clutching a fistful of his sleeve. "Don't pull away."

"I'm hurting you-"

"You know what hurts?" Val interrupted, suddenly fierce enough to make him stop, eyes wide as he look up at her. "It's not the cold, Loki, I don't _care_ about the cold. I care about you working yourself into the ground trying to be someone you're not."

He bit his lip, looking away. "I don't have a choice."

"Yes, you do," she snapped, catching his chin and pulling him back around. "You have the choice not to do this alone."

He tore away from her, vaulting to his feet and taking a few unsteady steps towards the nearest window, gazing up at the storm clouds. "Thor said _I_ could do it. _Me_. I have to prove him right, just once, because I can't- I couldn't even give him a _real_ funeral."

Val sighed, scrubbing a hand over her face. "Loki… This isn't what he would've wanted."

"How do you know?" he snapped. "You barely knew him."

She swallowed down her indignation – he wasn't angry at her. He was angry at the universe, and that, she understood. "No," she allowed. "But I knew him long enough to see how he loved you. How he protected you from everyone, how he trusted you when no one else did. I knew him long enough to stay up late talking and listen to his stories of you, listen to him hope you would get along with Tony and Steve and all the others. He even mentioned ditching Earth entirely if they didn't accept you."

Loki turned, just enough to see the profile of his face silhouetted against the storm. "He… he did?"

She nodded, rising to her feet. "Now, I wouldn't have let him go that far, but all he ever wanted was for you to be happy."

Loki's voice cracked. "So why did he die?"

Val winced at the memory. She had been across the battlefield, uselessly far away when Thor screamed. She had spun around just in time to see Loki slaughter their attacker in an explosion of green. Just in time to see the rage disappear as he caught Thor before he could hit the ground, the king's arms and body positioned as if he had just been leaping past Loki.

Except he wasn't leaping _past_ Loki. He had never intended to survive that jump. Not when the alternative was watching Loki die again.

At her silence, he turned back to the window, crossing his arms tightly. "If he really wanted me to be happy, he would've let me join Mother. Not him."

Val ran a hand through her hair. "All right, you have a point there. But… Can you really fault him for wanting you to live?"

Loki's shoulders slumped. "No."

She stepped closer. "Besides, he never meant that you have to do any of this alone. He died knowing I was there, that Bruce was there, that all of his friends both old and new were there. He died knowing you would _never_ want for help."

She reached his side, reaching her arm across his back to squeeze his shoulder. He was still cold, but no longer painful to touch. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, a flash of lightning glinting on the tears held in it.

"The Thor I knew was a team player. He found friends wherever he went, found them in even the hardest and most broken souls, and he pulled them into the weirdest teams I've ever seen."

Loki huffed a dry laugh. "I can't do that."

"Neither of us can," Val agreed. "We're not puppies made of sunshine. But we are both leaders, and between the two of us, I _think_ we can manage to deal with moronic humans."

A small, genuine smile managed to break through Loki's despair, and he leaned his head on hers, just chilly enough to be refreshing. She held him close. "You have a queen for a reason, Loki."

"I wha- oh. We did get married, didn't we."

Val jerked back. "You _forgot_?"

"I _died_ like fifteen minutes later!" he protested. "And then… and then…"

"I know," Val said softly, pulling him back to her. He buried his face in her hair, his tears weaving a chilly track through her hair. His sobs were silent and still, his mind and body too exhausted to shake and cry. She just held him up, watching the storm rage outside.

"I can't go back in there," Loki whispered when he finally spoke again.

"I'll deal with Ross," she said, tilting her head to kiss him gently. For the first time in a month, he kissed her back with no hint of distraction in the touch. "You can deal with something far more fun to help boost our people's spirits."

Loki pulled back, furrowing his brows and tilting his head. "What's that?"

As she spoke, a ray of sunshine burst through the clouds, bathing them in golden light. "We need to get married! And I expect the party to have nothing less than all of Wakanda's booze."

-MCU-

Two months later, the final day of celebrations doubled as their coronation ceremony. They waited in a white-and-gold tent for their cue, putting the final touches on each other's outfits. As the announcer neared the end of his speech, she looked up at him. "Are you ready?"

"With you as my queen? Always."

She slugged him, fighting back a smile. "Stop being cheesy."

He laughed, the sound returned to its full musical glory, his eyes sparkling even in the shadows of the tent. "Don't wrinkle my sleeve."

"…And now, I present to you: King Loki and Queen Brunnhilde!"

"I told him not to call me Brunnhilde," she muttered.

"It's tradition, my love."

"Since when do _you_ care about tradition, Mr. I Break All The Rules?"

"Since it put you in that crown. And that's _King_ I Break All The Rules."

She shook her head in affectionate exasperation as the tent flaps were pulled aside.

They linked hands, the touch a warm source of strength, and stepped into the radiant sunlight, matching capes billowing in the breeze.


End file.
